This project is a collaboration of Skidmore College and Union College, two small, selective liberal arts colleges located in close proximity in upstate New York, to enhance the recruitment and retention of women in the STEM disciplines and to promote their advancement through rank. The multifaceted program uses and adapts exemplary tools from NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation programs at large research institutions to the climate and conditions at Skidmore and Union Colleges and more broadly contributes to the adaptation, translation, development and expansion of these resources to predominately undergraduate liberal arts colleges in general.
Intellectual merit. The adaptation of exemplary tools from large research institutions to Skidmore College and Union College, where the relative importance of teaching, scholarship, and service is quite different from research universities, will provide valuable models and resources for the NSF ADVANCE "Best Practices" portfolio. It should be noted that Skidmore and Union differ from one another in significant ways: Skidmore, co-educational since 1971, was originally a women's college that traditionally emphasized arts and humanities. Over the course of the past decade, it has been successful in increasing the role of the STEM disciplines in its curriculum. Union is a formerly all-male college, also coeducational since 1970, that historically has had a strong academic science and engineering orientation -- approximately 40% of its students major in the lab sciences and engineering. Thus, the two institutions bring different experiences and strengths to the project, and tools developed for this project are expected to have broad applicability to a wide variety of liberal arts institutions.
The project targets women faculty in the STEM disciplines at two specific career stages: tenure-track women and tenured associate professors who have been at that rank for seven or more years. A central goal is to provide these women with the resources and support to move up in rank from assistant to tenured associate professor or from associate to full professor. In addition, we seek to understand local climate issues that affect hiring, faculty development, and promotion of women and create environments that will result in a more balanced gender ratio in STEM disciplines at our institutions. The project comprises two types of activities: (1) activities aimed at recognizing and combating gender bias in the STEM disciplines, including climate surveys, training workshops for hiring and promotion, public events to raise awareness across campus and educational activities to reduce undergraduate bias; and (2) activities providing STEM faculty with mentoring and development opportunities to help them advance their careers, including: the creation of a cross-institutional mentoring network of women in the STEM disciplines and support for research, advanced education and teaching load modification. The activities in this project will be adapted from exemplary practices currently in use at other ADVANCE institutions, such as Virginia Tech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Michigan. They will be overseen by a Skidmore-Union Network (SUN) Committee of STEM faculty that is modeled after a successful ADVANCE program at the University of Michigan. A website will be developed to help participating women learn about all the programs that are offered, and also to facilitate finding potential collaborators and mentors.
Broader impacts. This project is designed to build a sustainable partnership between two highly regarded liberal arts colleges for the enhancement, recruitment, retention and advancement of women in the STEM disciplines and to broadly disseminate the models and resources developed under this grant to other liberal arts schools. It contains activities and tools to strengthen the teaching and scholarship of women faculty in the STEM disciplines, through the development of web-based resources that are accessible to a wide range of schools and their faculty, and by the dissemination of its practices and findings to other liberal arts colleges seeking to advance the careers of their women faculty.
